


92 Days

by trickstered



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Band Fic, Bro Is Arrested For Fraud, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:42:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28653693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trickstered/pseuds/trickstered
Summary: On the thirteenth of August, Dave leaves his childhood home and right onto Karkat's fold out bed. It works out, somehow.
Relationships: Sollux Captor/Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	92 Days

**Author's Note:**

> For the incredible [Raiden](http://www.twitter.com/spaceraestuck) who said 'garage band au' and my brain said 'we can get bro arrested for fraud.'

On the thirteenth of August, Karkat Vantas opens his front door to the disheveled form of Dave, a bag slung over one shoulder and the concerning sight of his music gear tucked into a little wheel-cart. It’s blazing hot in Texas at one in the afternoon, and even with a cap pulled across his face and the tell-tale sign of white smooshed on his nose, Dave is still a little scarlet on his forehead and damp looking.

“Hey,” he says, adjusting his bag. “So funny thing, my bro just got arrested for fraud and I was hopin’ you’d let lil ole me —“

Before he even gets to finish, Karkat lifts a hand, rubs a hand across his eyes and nods. “You can use the blow up bed. Hurry up and come in, I’ve got beans on the stove.”

-

As it turns out, it isn’t just fraud. Embezzlement, money laundering and a whole laundry list of shit that Karkat doesn’t have the patience to really get into. Dave decides he doesn’t want to talk about it, and that’s fine. It’s expected; Karkat doesn’t push, because in the five years the two of them have been dancing around flirting with one another, he’s learned that Dave always ends up accidentally talking about his feelings hours later.

Dave dives face first into the beans and bread, talking with his mouth full about the belongings he managed to grab in a hurry. Karkat glances at the little cart of Dave’s Shit and nods appropriately, and when he’s certain Dave has taken a break for air, or to swallow, he adds, deadpan: “So what exactly the plan, here?” 

The beans are all but done when Dave uses his bed to scrape the plate, and he shrugs a little while doing it. “Like I said, I was kind of hoping --” 

A hand lifting, Karkat nods. “I know. I can only let you crash here a week before that pain in the ass comes home.” 

Dave pauses, quiet, and it’s never a good sign when Dave shuts his mouth, but there’s a pathetic little downturn of his mouth that Karkat knows usually preludes some absolute horseshit about how he’s totally fine and self-sufficient. 

“Jesus,” Karkat mutters, sitting down at the counter and slipping his hands over his face. He thinks, and thinks, his thumbs working into the deep corners of his eyes. “You make it incredibly hard to like you,” he adds, after a moment. That is how Dave ends up with a near-permanent fold up bed perched precariously at the foot of Karkat’s, for far longer than a week.

-

For the first month, Dave does his own thing. That is, he goes to his slightly boring job on the other side of town in the morning, and by the evening he’s so ravenous that he barely hears Karkat talking about his day before they decide to play video games. On his days off, Karkat lets him sleep until noon and on weekends, Karkat disappears for hours and returns looking grumpy and slightly grey. Dave doesn’t ask, at first. He wants to, of course, because the curiosity eats him alive and, frankly, any time that Karkat is not dedicating to his rap rifts is time wasted. He doesn’t have to ask, in the end, because one day Karkat steps into their room with a pained look on his face, and says: “Under no circumstances can you come to the garage. No matter what you hear.” 

To which Dave replies: “Uhhh.” 

“I mean it,” Karkat says, looking greyer by the second and then he’s gone. 

For about half an hour, Dave does what he’s told before the first sound of Karkat’s muffled voice screaming: _It’s in the right fucking socket, numbnuts!!!_ pulls him from their room, down the stairs and with his ear pressed against the garage door. There is a muffled, one-sided argument that sounds suspiciously like Karkat swearing to himself specifically, before another voice offers, deadpan: “The AMP’s unplugged, moron.” 

There is a moments silence; a prolonged pause before the softest, quietest “Oh,” and then another clang before Dave hears a familiar vibration. More than that, Dave knows the other voice the way he knows the face of Carla Gugino for starring alongside Ben Miller in the cult classic _Night at the Museum:_ the unparalleled beautiful love interest of someone Dave refuses to admit he likes. Except, of course, that Sollux Captor in not an unparalleled beauty. He’s worse: he’s an unparalleled pain in Karkat’s ass. The Original; The First. 

Quietly, he returns to Karkat’s room, slips on his earphones, and spends the next six hours absolutely not sulking. 

-

There comes a point, perhaps on the third weekend that Karkat cagily retires to the den of inquiry that his garage has become, that Dave has to face the truth of it: Karkat and Sollux are not running a secret meth lab, or even having a scandalous affair. Perhaps more embarrassingly, they are making shitty music together in the most non-sexy way that Dave has ever encountered. His suspicions are confirmed one Saturday when, while looking for the last bottle of apple juice in Karkat’s fridge, they both walk in with Sollux using a drumstick to scratch his lower back while Karkat screeches, absolutely furious: “Are you scratching your ass with my drumstick?”

They both shut up upon seeing Dave’s face and honestly, he’s offended. He doesn’t get it; on more than one occasion, Dave has spilled his wretched little heart out with his face buried on Karkat’s lap, and he can’t even tell him about his dumb little two-man band? It’s bizarre. It’s beyond comprehension. It is, actually, also a little hurtful. 

He gives them both a little salute and returns to the comfort of his own personal wallowing, silently watching _Animaniacs_ on mute. 

-

It goes on like this, for a while. Dave’s month stretches into two, and he does well on avoiding news topics about his brother's case up until he catches himself with his name typed into a google search bar, palms sweaty and his hands shaking a little. He sits like that for longer than he’d like, his back teeth grinding back and forth until his finger slams delete well beyond the letters disappearing. 

Control is an obscure concept, he’s come to realise. He has also realised, as the weeks have gone on, how little he had of it. 

He escapes the temptation with another trip to the kitchen, headphones around his neck and a gnawing in his gut that feels like being clotheslined on a scorching day. He barely makes it to the fridge before he hears the _thumpthumpthump_ of Karkat’s drums and the idle note-tuning of what he assumes must be Sollux on bass. 

He thinks to ignore it; mentally he presses a finger on the delete button of his own selfish jealousy and walks first, to the cupboards in search of instant ramen and hot sauce. But the thump continues, as does the muffled conversation, and then there is just one out of tune note too much and before he knows it, he has opened the door leading to the garage, knuckles white at the doorknob, and he breathes out, exasperated: “Please, for the love of god, let me tune it, you tone deaf dorks.”

He doesn’t really give them a chance to argue. In seconds, he’s already in with them, carefully tuning out Karkat’s sputtering protests and taking the bass from Sollux, who looks caught between not caring and being absolutely appalled at being called a dork. That is how he ends up inserting himself into the equation: he tries not to feel smug about it. 

-

The music they make is a little boring, at first. Dave knows instruments in a vague sense; Jade gave him a bass master class once when she turned him down for sampling on one of his mixtapes. ‘Do it yourself’ had been followed by ‘you’re so dumb Dave’ and three weeks of lessons which were one two things his brother ever complimented him on. 

Dave tunes the bass, and Karkat begrudgingly asks if he’d like to play guitar and Dave responds with a ‘nah’, and spends the first sessions dicking around and fixing their equipment. Some days he disappears, and on others, he zones in on either Karkat or Sollux’s beats and in his mind begins to map out what might be overlaid on top. Synths; vocals; drops. The garage is too small for his decks, but there’s space in Karkat’s room when his bed is folded away that he starts to imagine he could use. 

“Can I record some of this,” he asks one afternoon, to which Karkat says ‘no’ at the same time Sollux says ‘sure.’ It’s funny, actually; like a little live action comedy duo that don’t realise they’re funny. “I just wanna see if I can do something with it,” he adds. 

Karkat’s frown is so deep that Sollux jabs him in the stomach with the tail end of his bass. “It’s just sound, idiot. He isn’t recording your stupid forehead vein when you’re playing.”

“Fuck,” says Karkat, rubbing his side, “you. Fine, whatever.” 

“You’re so cranky,” Dave mutters, phone already in hand. “Is that any way to treat the guy who cleans your toilet?”

“It’s the fucking least you could do!” 

-

The mixing is a relaxing process. It keeps Dave away from the temptations of google, and in between that and going back and forth to work, the impending court case feels like a thousand miles away. The band practice is,fine, too. It’s not all insults and exasperation; Dave gives them some melodies which they do not hate, and more than once, Dave is certain he catches Karkat very tenderly rubbing hand cream onto Sollux’s newly-callousing fingertips. 

His feelings about that are, at the very least, complicated. Sollux isn’t even as annoying as Dave hoped. On one afternoon, on his way home from work, Sollux meets him three blocks away and they walk the rest of the distance together. First, in silence, and then Sollux mentions a video game, and it’s easier. It happens every so often: Dave doesn’t always get a weekend off, and the conversations are less awkward each time. 

Some part of him, too, wants Sollux to like him. It’s a desperately insecure needle in his side, that wants the approval of Karkat’s oldest friend. He tries not to think too hard about his feelings about that, either. 

-

When he presents them the remix, Sollux’s eyebrows lift over his glasses and Karkat’s pinched expression softens enough that Dave wonders if he played the song, or if he actually played a six minute loop of himself crying. He checks, and then Karkat says, while glancing at Sollux: “I mean, it works, right? It’s good.” 

And Sollux nods in that annoyingly vague way he does, and says: “Not bad.” Which Dave knows now, thanks to the video conversations, actually means he likes it. 

-

He thinks about new remixes. He’s telling Sollux this on one of their rare little meet-up’s, about how he’d like to do a series of recordings and mix them up -- maybe introduce some vocals, or even violin. (“Violin,” Sollux says, surprised, and Dave shrugs, and says: “I know a gal.”) 

He’s half-way explaining the theme he has in mind when someone calls, “Mr. Strider?” and he pauses without thinking, stopping to turn. She’s unassuming, of course. Black hair, a smile that could cut diamonds, and dressed in a cerulean ensemble that is so perfectly unwrinkled that Dave just knows she spent hours doing it. “Ah, it is you.”

“Uh,” Dave says, and Sollux glances at him, frowning. “Yeah?” 

When she smiles with her teeth, Dave feels a chill run down his spine even with way it reaches her eyes, almost kind. “My name is Aranea Serket. I was hoping to get your reaction to your brothers recent decision to --” 

The rest of it is white noise. Dave’s ears begin to ring, and he knows his eyes are wide behind his sunglasses. At his side, his hand squeezes and unsqueezes into a fist; chest tight, throat dry, he begins to think. _How did they find me,_ and then, more paranoid, _does he know where -_

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” he hears Sollux say, with a hand on his arm, beginning to pull. “Go find some other shmuck to harass.” 

Aranea’s voice carries behind them, following and then distant. All Dave can say is, “thanks, man,” in a way that he absolutely does not like. 

“Sure,” Sollux says, hand still on his arm, and then, “we should order pizza when we get there. New Yorker, right?” and Dave has never been more thankful in his life. 

-

On the last day of the third month, two weeks after Dave’s incredibly put-together panic attack, they’re still in the garage when the sun starts to go down with a fan pointed directly at Karkat’s face. Sollux sits by the wall, idly looking over some of the notes Dave has written down, and for all it’s quiet, it feels. Nice. It feels good. 

Reality, though, sits within the unanswered text from Rose, and the empty apartment he’s left behind on the other side of town. It sits on the news outlets he’s been avoiding; on the TV that Karkat has carefully made sure is always off, and in the newspapers that he sees sometimes, on stands on his way to work. His phone vibrates, twice, and when he glances down its June with something completely mundane, and Dave realises that this is reality, too. 

With a deep breath, he looks between Karkat’s blissfully windswept expression and Sollux’s pensive concentration, and says, at last: “You guys think we could skip practice next week? I, uh,” he says, and then, swallowing, follows with: “I think I’m ready to go back. Put everything in order.” 

Karkat looks at him with one eye, and Sollux lifts his head from the scribbles in front of him. “Sure,” Sollux says, with an audible question mark at the same time Karkat says, “do you want us to come with you?” 

“Yeah,” Dave says, with palpable relief. “Yeah. Please.”

“Sure,” Sollux says again. 

“Bring rubber gloves,” Karkat says, closing his eyes again. “You think he came here cleaning toilets?” Sollux snorts at the same time Dave begins to protest; the argument is slow, and then loud, and not at all serious. 

And just like that, reality is fine. It’s manageable. It’s good. 


End file.
